Printed in an edition of 3, plus one artist's proof, and one poet's proof.

Materials/Medium: Cyanotype on paper, silk, waxed thread, book board, book cloth.

"Fragment, in praise of the book is a sphere of text, printed in deep blue cyanotype on white paper, then backed with transparent black silk. Jesseca Ferguson's 'cyanosphere, ' or three-dimensional cyanotype, transforms Meena Alexander's poem into one linear element, wound into a ball like yarn - to be knitted or woven into an ordered and coherent form. Text comes from textus, derived from texere, to weave. Text is the tissue or fabric of a literary work, woven of words. The original fabric of Meena's text has been rearranged, taken out of sequence, line by line, then re-ordered - to be read in a new sequence as the spherical book is unspooled, delicately, by hand. When a bomb explodes in a bookshop, in a life, in a mind - all is violently disordered, fragmented. The writing of a poem, and the hand-making of a sphere of text - these are our way to re-tell that story, to make a new order from those fragments. The text of Meena's poem glows paper-white, as her words emerge from the darkness of Jesseca's cyanotype, veiled with silk"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.